In the Han dynasty there was a man of Qiancheng named Dong Yong. His mother died when he was small, and he and his father lived alone, working their fields. When the old man grew too weak to walk, Dong Yong carried him to the fields in a little handcart, so that he could work and care for him at the same time.
Then his father died, and Dong Yong had nothing — no money for a coffin, no money for a grave. So he did the only thing left to a poor man: he sold himself into slavery to pay for the funeral. His new master, hearing the circumstances, marvelled at him, gave him ten thousand cash, and sent him home to bury his father.
Dong Yong kept the full three years of mourning. When they were done he set out for his master’s house to begin his life of service — and on the road he met a woman he had never seen before.
“I wish to be your wife,” she said.
It was not a proposal a poor slave had any business questioning. She went with him to the master’s house, and the master, remembering the ten thousand cash, said there was no debt to repay. But Dong Yong would not hear of it. “You were generous when I had nothing,” he said. “I am a small man, but I will serve to repay a great kindness.”
The master looked at the woman. “What can she do?” he asked.
“She weaves,” said Dong Yong.
“Then let her weave me a hundred bolts of silk, and your debt is paid.”
So she sat down at the loom. And she wove — ten bolts a day, silk finer than anything the district had seen, pattern on pattern like frost on a window. In ten days the hundred bolts were done, and the debt was paid, and the master let them go in amazement.
They walked out of the gate and down the road, free. At the place where they had first met, the woman stopped.
“I am the Weaver Maid of heaven,” she said. “Your filial piety touched the Emperor of Heaven, and he sent me down to help you pay your debt. Now the debt is paid, and I must go back.”
And she rose into the air before his eyes, and was gone among the clouds, leaving Dong Yong standing on the road with his freedom in his hands.
That is the whole of the old tale — barely two hundred characters long. Later ages could not leave it alone. They made the Weaver Maid fall in love, gave her a cruel Queen Mother who tore the lovers apart, gave Dong Yong a bridge of magpies and a yearly meeting in the stars. But in the oldest telling there is no villain and no heartbreak, only a ledger in heaven and a man whose grief for his father was so complete that heaven itself came down to help him pay it.